Overhauling “How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap?”

by Pascal Neis - Published: October 26th, 2012

My last update about the HDYC website is a few months old now. For those readers who do not know what HDYC is: “How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap?” is a webpage which shows you in detail how long, when, where a member of the OSM project contributed to the project and which tools she/he used.

This time I added some new stats and graphs to the site. One of my favorite new features is the location information which shows the countries in which a contributor created at least one OSM Node:

A second new feature shows how long the mapper is already registered with the project and how many *active* mapping days she/he had:

You can also find some more information about the changesets of the user e.g. the number of changesets with a comment, the number of unique changeset comments and the median character length of the comments. Additionally, you will also see some information about deleted nodes, ways or relations:

Some of you might know about Richard Weait’s “Mapper Baseball Cards” idea. I added a similar graph to the end of the page to show which editors have been used by the mapper (thx Richard for the idea).

You will also see some facts about how many traces a user has uploaded to the OSM project and how many user blocks he received or if a user block is still active. Most of the stats are updated on a daily basis while the changeset stats will be updated once per week (which depend on the changeset dump).

How about puting the user picture somewhere, to humanize these stats a little ?

As for a more challenging improvement : there’s a lot of interesting metrics here but I often wish they were sliced differently. How did metric foobar evolve over the years ? Am I mapping differently depending on the country ? Do I use JOSM for relations and potlach for the rest ? If there was a graph that offered a dropdown of options for the X and Y axis, we’d have the answer to those questions.

I like the new information. I check my stats every once in awhile. The one interesting thing is that my use of Josm now exceeds Potlatch 1 and 2. What that does not say, however, is that I use Josm exclusively now. It would be interesting to break the editor use down by year like the “Number of Mapping Days per Year” bar graph.

Hi – nice stats, thanks! Do you have any idea why it says I have 874 changesets, whereas on my osm userpage it says “996 edits”? I think your data is up-to-date so why the difference? (my username is mcld)